Your child as a person

"Just a reminder: your kids are whole people. They're having experiences even when you're not there. They learn with you and without you."

—Holly Dodd

(I told Holly, "Say something I can quote in Just Add Light.")

SandraDodd.com/holly
photo by Julie D, of Holly and Adam
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Peace and change

When this was first published, November 18, 2014, the intro was:

The story quoted below is from nine years ago and involves a sixteen-year-old.

Marty is twenty-five now and is getting married in a couple of days.

Today, in 2025, I update it:

The story quoted below is from 20 years ago, and involves a sixteen-year-old.

Marty is 36 now, and is moving with his wife and two children to Anchorage, Alaska in six days.

Marty has an orthodonist appointment at 10:30 this morning, and works at noon. He has gone to ortho alone, and has taken Holly before. I asked yesterday if he wanted to go alone or me take him. He wanted me to go. He asked me to wake him up an hour before. He likes at least an hour before, and usually an hour and a half.

I forgot to wake him up, but I heard his alarm go off at 9:31 (and remembered I had forgotten).

He was tired and I offered to put a fifteen or twenty minute timer on and come and get him, but he said no, he wanted to get up.

There is a snapshot moment in the "don't have to" life of a sixteen year old boy.

I'm not saying that every child given leeway will be Marty.
I'm saying that every person who claims that leeway will inevitably cause sloth is proven wrong by Marty.

SandraDodd.com/sleeping
photo by Sandra Dodd, of Marty, a different morning in those same days

Significant shifts

Jen Keefe wrote, about "deserving" things:

One of the things I have found so wonderful about learning about unschooling is that whatever I learn in relation to my family life carries over to the rest of my life. I cannot remember the last time I felt like I "deserved" anything—that is a significant shift in the way I experience life and it has created a different childhood for my children.

—Jen Keefe

SandraDodd.com/deserve
photo by Holly Dodd

Even simpler

From some questions after a conference:

Q: When your child asks about something, for example "How do you write this letter?" do you focus on that until they are bored and let them bring it up again, or do you work on it over the course of days, weeks, months, until they are satisfied?

This was a written question, so I didn't get to ask whether by "letter" a piece of correspondence was meant, or a single figure. Same answer for both, though. I would just answer the question, sketching one example, and then see if the child wanted more information or not.

But if a single was meant, this morning (9/8/02) Holly asked me "What's the best way to make a 'q'?" I wrote four different ways, not knowing what she was asking. She was wanting the plainest printed "lower case" letter. So she picked the one that best matched the lettering she was doing, and she was happy. Total "lesson," fifteen seconds.

SandraDodd.com/questions
photo by Holly Dodd

Confidence and logic

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

I didn't get to observe radically unschooled kids before coming to the conclusions I did about how children learn. I'm sure it helps build confidence to see grown unschooled kids—that's why my kids and I make ourselves available. But it isn't necessary. For me, it required confidence in my own logical thinking ability. I reasoned things out and did what made sense to me.. . .My willingness to think for myself—to analyze, critique, to be open-minded, and to trust my own conclusions—that was how I came to understand unschooling.

—Pam Sorooshian

Understanding Unschooling
photo by Holly Dodd

Be there; have time; avoid stress

Schuyler Waynforth wrote:

I make lots of food. I like cooking. I like baking. And Simon and Linnaea mostly prefer my food to store food. But, for a long time, Simon preferred store bought bread to home made. Linnaea has never liked home made macaroni and cheese. And, honestly, my baking was always a time commitment. I have much more time now that they are 15 and 12 than I had when they were little.

When they were little, getting food in easy forms that they enjoyed that were quick for when David wasn't around to tag me, that was important. That was more important than any fear I may have had about what they were eating. Being there for them. Having the time for them.

Meredith wrote, and I want to underscore:

"Don't make it stressful - because what we know about nutrition has changed and changed and will change again, but stress is bad. We know that. Don't make life one bit more stressful."

—Schuyler Waynforth
quoting Meredith Novak

What problems can come?
(a long, rough, wonderful discussion from 2013)
photo by Sandra Dodd, embellished by Holly Dodd

Learning-and-living jobs

Some mainstream families press their teenaged children to get jobs, and shame them if they fail, while putting conditions on when and where they can work. The result is that getting a job was just one more "do what the parents make you do" situation, and the jobs aren't fun; they're an extension of school and of parental control.

When teens or young adults have chosen to have a job without desperation for money, and when they are accustomed to learning all the time and living joyfully, they are a different sort of employee.

SandraDodd.com/jobs/bigbook
gif by Holly Dodd

Affecting emotions

Reading odyssey

Though Holly wasn't reading, her vocabulary was sophisticated and she was fascinated by the history of and connectedness of words. When she did start to read, she had no reason to use easy books. She was still eleven when she did her first real reading, a Judy Blume novel. She read two of those, and moved on to Stephen King's novella The Body.

When she had only been reading a couple of months, we were sitting down to watch "The Twilight Zone,” Holly reached over to move the Tank Girl comic books she had been reading. One was called "The Odyssey." Then the DVD menu came up, and one of the episodes was "The Odyssey of Flight 33." She commented on it, and I said "You saw the word 'odyssey' twice in an hour? Cool!"

She said, "I saw the word 'odyssey' twice in one minute!"
. . . .Reading will happen, and if it takes longer for your children than you think it will, keep them happy and distracted in the meantime. As their experience and vocabulary grow, their reading will be that much more effortless the day they're fully equipped to understand the written word.

SandraDodd.com/r/threereaders
photo by Sandra Dodd (click it)
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Looking more closely

Karen James wrote:

The best thing I did for my relationship with my son, which, consequently, added to his ease of learning naturally, was to look away from what all of my friends were doing, and look more closely at what my own son was inspired by.

—Karen James

That quote continues at: SandraDodd.com/readalittle
photo by Holly Dodd

Hobbit age of majority

Yesterday our youngest turned 33 years old. As I write this, her brothers are at her birthday party. Kirby is providing karaoke.

They are all in their thirties. Kirby will be in his 30s until late summer of 2026. He has been married for eight years, and Marty for nearly a decade.

In 2007, I wrote this:

Our family is experiencing a sort of magic window. As of November 2, our children (who are no longer children) have attained a set of momentous ages: 21, 18 and 16. This alignment ends on January 14, when Marty turns 19, but for a couple of months we have the only and last set of landmark years we'll ever have.

Our two boys are at the traditional ages of majority in different ways, in different places and times. Kirby is a man. Marty is a junior man. Our baby and only girl is "sweet sixteen."

The memories of them at all their ages are like sweet ghosts around me.

SandraDodd.com/magicwindow
photo by Sandra Dodd

Photos by, or art by, or mentions of Holly Dodd in other posts

Doing Nothing, and finding balance

Halfway between the past we can't change and the future we can only imagine, we find ourselves in the present. Not just the present year, but the present day; not just the present day, but the present moment.

From Balancing in the Middle Ground:

[Some families] had stopped doing school, and then stopped making their kids do anything, and now their kids were doing NOTHING.

Aside from the idea of the rich potential of their "nothing," the parents had gone from making their kids do everything, to "making them do nothing." And interestingly, it did make them "do nothing," at first. Or at least the parents couldn't see the new things they were doing.

Rather than moving from one edge of a dichotomy to the other, the goal is to move to a whole new previously unknown middle place.

Holly Dodd, and the false sea onion

photo by Holly Dodd in 2009
original post, 2010

"Knowing nothing" is impossible

Q: What if your child (like mine) has an interest in one area (Civil War), yet hardly reads about it and never shows an interest in other historical periods (mine does, luckily)?

A: Videos. Novels. Ignore the periods he doesn't care about. He'll care later, or he won't, and the world will still turn, and he can learn what he wants WHEN he wants. History is NEVER all learned. It's all relative. "Knowing nothing" is impossible in this culture.

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I answered that question when the internet was new. Now, period photos, recordings of music, maps, and videos of battleground tours are available without leaving home. Web searches will bring explanations of gatling guns and cannons, medical advancements (nursing, sanitation), pensions for veterans and other innovations of those days.

SandraDodd.com/reassurance
photo by Holly Dodd

Learning from life

Me, interviewed, answering this question:

Q: If you were to define unschooling in three words, what would they be?

A: I wouldn’t. It’s too easy to mislead. Too often, people grab a phrase or idea and run off and make a mess with it. If it’s used lightly though, I don’t mind “learning from life”.

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The interviewer said I had been writing about unschooling online since Yahoogroups days, but I was on in 1993, even before the AOL message boards came and went. 🙂

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Sandra Dodd—30 years of Unschooling
photo by Holly Dodd

Generosity and appreciation

Holly drove me to a neighborhood near her house where she has seen peacocks, roaming. We spotted four, but this one was up high in the sunshine.

Schuyler Waynforth once drove me where she was pretty sure we would see kangaroos. There were many; I was in awe.

I have driven visitors to see prairie dogs, and to find tumbleweeds.

What is commonplace for one person might be a memorable moment of beauty for others.

SandraDodd.com/happiness
photo by Sandra Dodd

Real respect

Some people confuse respect and courtesy. Some people confuse nicey-niceness with respect. But real respect changes action and affects decisions.
. . . . Respect can be shown sometimes by being quiet. Sometimes it can be shown by thinking about what someone says and not dismissing it half-heard.

SandraDodd.com/respect/problems
photo by Holly Dodd
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More dots to connect

If one thing makes you think of another thing, you form a connection between them in your mind. The more connections you have, the better access you have to cross-connections. The more things something can remind you of, the more you know about it, or are learning about it.

Flat representations can't show these connections. Neither could an elaborate three-dimensional model, because when you consider what a thing is or what it's like, you not only make connections with other concepts, but experiences and emotions. You will have connections reaching into the past and the future, connections related to sounds, smells, tastes and textures. The more you know about something, the more you can know, because there are more and more hooks to hang more information on—more dots to connect.

I got the idea for this kind of graph from Trust the Children: A Manual and Activity Guide for Homeschooling and Alternative Learning by Anna Kealoha.

Here's a simple mathematical example:

But being more "cross-disciplinary" about it, not limiting to just one area, we've played with them more like this:

And any of those can become "the center" and branch out to everything else in the whole wide world. But at the heart of this exercise is what is and what isn't: What IS a thing, and what is not the thing? What is like it and what is unlike it?

CONNECTIONS: How Learning Works
graphs by Sandra Dodd, when Holly Dodd was thirteen years old

Teens can feel crowded

[Teens can feel crowded] by the new and real knowledge that the house is small and the world is huge.

Baby birds have no idea what's outside that nest.

Young children will occasionally find some corner of the house, some closet or a wall surface that was always covered by furniture before and they are not surprised that there are parts of that house they had never seen before. The house is everything.

Teenagers know they are meant to get up and go out. They're not happy about it, sometimes, especially when their house is a haven of love and sweetness and creativity, but their instincts kick in anyway and their perspective changes, very literally, and that nest seems like just a little wad of sticks on one little branch of one of ten thousand trees....

Crowded by their new awarenesses and raging hormones and their relative size (their rooms and beds are getting smaller by the day) and their collections of stuffed animals and action figures and Lego.

Sandra
(January 2000, with one teen and two pre-teens then)

SandraDodd.com/teen/crowded
photo of Holly Dodd on her way to a party

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This photo was in the Just Add Light folder for many, many years, waiting for a quote or topic it might slightly match.
Good enough.

Holly and the Hippie Shirt

The article's real name is "Art, Aging and Spirituality— Connections between Things and Ideas." I wrote it in early 2001, when Holly was nine years old.

I will quote the end, and usher you toward the full article:

We all are preparing for our unseen futures, and I was prepared to homeschool. I am prepared to discuss the social history of the 70's musicals Holly is frolicking with now, in a shirt I made when a brand new India print bedspread could be bought by a barefooted hippie for $4. She is surprisingly prepared, at the age of nine, to understand it.

That was written for a local homeschooling newsletter, so I apologize for the neighborhood particulars. Those from Albuquerque, or who attended the University of New Mexico, might've perked up. ***

SandraDodd.com/HippieShirt
photo by Sandra Dodd

Really very peaceful

Sandra, March 2008:

All my kids have TVs in their rooms. No... Holly took hers out when the VHS player broke, and it's in a corner in the front room now, unused. She has a computer. So do the other two kids, just since last year for the younger two.

Hours, whole days go by with those rooms quiet, with one of the kids in there drawing or listening to music at the most, or playing with lego while a familiar movie is on, and they'll look up at their favorite parts, maybe.

Our house is really very peaceful. A house full of "no" can't begin to be this peaceful.


Principles of Unschooling?
photo by Holly Dodd, with a timer and then photoshop
(sitting at my computer, not hers, that day)